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The truly sad part of this is most Chinese people wouldn't really mind the site being blocked because of this, nor even be all that surprised to learn what the

• tokenizer 14y ago
  Not just in China, I'm sure if this was AlJazeera being blocked in the US the majority of Americans wouldn't care as well.
  • codewright 14y ago
    That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera. One of the most conservative people I know, a PoliSci major, gets a large portion of his news from AlJ. If you took that away from him he'd hoist the black flag and start slitting throats the next morning.
    • kooshball 14y ago
      >That's not true at all. Not only are westerners rather proprietary about their freedoms, but most of the more politically engaged people I know read AlJazeera. Lets be realistic. Only a small portion of Americans follow AlJ. Just like I'm sure there are small proportion of Chinese that follow western news stories about china closely. The parent post was talking about average citizens not political engaged people.
      • deleted 14y ago
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      • ImprovedSilence 14y ago
        Yeah, but here's the thing about the US. It's a large enough number of people, to the point where somebody would be making noise until it was remedied. Also, I'd like to think that the US is culturally diverse enough, that there are large communities and groups of people outside the standard "white male" category who are reading AlJ, and would complain loudly if said paper was fire-walled. Lastly, hopefully there would be trusted academics and professors who would yell and howl and moan about the ethics of it. Then the stereotypical American would get involved, over the simple facts that his is America, and he loves freedom.
  • wilfra 14y ago
    If the Obama Administration started regularly deleting tweets and removing things from Google search results, a pretty big chunk of the American people would be really pissed off about that - including the Supreme Court and most Attorneys General. And people would vigorously hunt down the information that was being hidden from them. Generally speaking, this is not the case in China. The people know this is being done, don't really care and don't go out of their way to learn the truth. Ultimately I guess thats why they can get away with it. If this were something the average Chinese person got really angry about, it would never work. They'd have another revolution on their hands.
    • ihsw 14y ago
      They already do it with torrent websites and nobody cares, how much of a stretch is other politically inconvenient sites being unilaterally blocked?
      • nicholas_tuzzio 14y ago
        Said torrenting sites are by and large against the laws of the US and many other nations and shouldn't be compared to the NYT.
        • fijal 14y ago
          I'm sure NYT is at odds with the laws of China by publishing things that blatantly (and I'm sure falsely) accuse the ruling elite. That does not mean they should be compared. However, your argument is flawed (and you can do much better than this to prove why they should not be compared).
        • jarek 14y ago
          Defaming sovereign leaders is against the laws of many other nations - laws as popular as Anglo-Saxon copyright laws.
        • smokeyj 14y ago
          > torrenting sites are by and large against the laws of the US Right. We have free speech as long as it's legal. Just like the Chinese.
  • seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Are you apart of the wumao? If the US blocked AlJazeera, their would be holy hell to pay in the press. It would be a huge story and their would be huge consequences. We really value free speech that much. We might not care to read it, but if it is blocked, that would go against our principles.
• bilbo0s 14y ago
  Wow! You are the first Westerner I've read or come across that has noticed this! Most of them seem to think things like blocking internet sites matter??? To the Chinese... I don't think it does. There also seems to be this conspiracy thinking going on as well. Chinese people see conspiracies EVERYWHERE. If an article like that is in the NY Times... Then, to the Chinese mind... It must be the US Government "trying to keep China down." Seriously. Whenever I'm in Ningbo these days, I just avoid talking about anything remotely political... it is an exercise in frustration. Sigh... I suppose we have a Tin Foil Hat crowd over here as well. However, even though in the States I will concede that that crowd is growing, I don't think it is as big percentage wise as in China.
• edwardw 14y ago
  You are such an acute observer, sir. This is the most accurate description about the matter by someone not Chinese I ever read. For that you have my respect.
• JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  An influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified, in 1981, a cultural dimension he terms "power distance", defined as "the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally". On PDI, scaled zero to one hundred, the U.S. scores 40 and China scores 80 (Russia scores 93). Another dimension of significance is individualism, defined as "the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members". On IDV the U.S. scores 91 and China 20 (Russia scores 39). China (and Russia) value social cohesion along implicitly informative, i.e. highly contextual, information flows. Leaders are given tremendous leeway to do their jobs and are to be questioned only in cases of extreme breach of obligation, i.e. when they threaten social harmony. Note that Russians, in surveys, explicitly prefer social stability to free speech and a free media. Chinese find the legalistic contortions American politicians have to go through to do something generally favoured as awkward and wasteful. We see allowing elites to enrich themselves off market reforms to help them buy into the idea of change as distasteful whereas from a social utilitarian perspective it's strategically kosher.
  • deleted 14y ago
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  • Retric 14y ago
    That's interesting. I wonder how Japan scores on those scales as they share many cultural values with China, but have vary different governments.
    • uniclaude 14y ago
      Living there, I was curious about that too. See this link: http://geert-hofstede.com/japan.html http://geert-hofstede.com/japan.html
    • blrgeek 14y ago
      The Japanese closer to the Chinese, that the USA. The vast difference is 'Uncertainty Avoidance' - while Chines go with the flow and are able to accept Uncertainty, the Japanese will do nearly anything to avoid uncertainty. [J:92, C:30] The second difference is in Competition/Cooperation [Masculinity/Feminity], (J:95, C:66]. Japanese society values hard work and competition and excelling in work far more than any other society.
• rohern 14y ago
  I think you are correct for the most part. When I lived in China, my experience was that most people felt the way that you describe or they simply were not going to embarrass their country by admitting to a foreigner that they felt that things were unjust in China. There were some persons with whom I became good enough friends for them to feel comfortable talking about politics, and among these people disappointment in their government was the dominant emotion. Some of them showed considerable shame about the treatment of Tibet, for example, though most of them had little concept of the history of the situation. There is also a strong reaction among most Chinese people that while the Chinese themselves might not like the policies of the government, they will not stand to have an outsider -- good old waiguo guizi ("foreign devil") -- tell them their business nor criticize their country. They will handle their own problems, thank you very much. This is an attitude one finds no shortage of in the United States. You also need to understand the general ignorance of the wider world among the populace in China. There is the stereotypical case: Shanghai is a major tourist destination inside China. One of the many attractions in Shanghai are all the weird looking foreigners! Walk down the Bund, the main boardwalk, and you'll be stopped every ten meters for a picture. A friend of mine with a red beard was a huge hit. Even university teachers were misinformed about the world. I would sometimes casually question them, having traveled a lot myself, on what they thought the world was like. They were certain that Beijing was as advanced as any other city in the world. Tokyo and New York were basically the same as any big city in China. They were not aware how strange the pollution is to outsiders. They did not know that in most large cities in other countries, you can see the sky.
• monochromatic 14y ago
  It just blows my mind. I once discussed this issue with a tour guide in China, and his response was basically that censorship was ok, because people would just get all upset about things otherwise. How do you even respond to that?
• ucee054 14y ago
  How much do you think Americans mind the Julian Assange affair? I get the impression the difference between the societies is only of degree, not quality.
• tokenadult 14y ago
  They just accept this as the way things are. I can remember when this was true of people in Taiwan, as I was living in Taiwan when it was still a dictatorship. But I also know people in China who have told me very explicitly, "If China had a free press, the Communist Party would only last a week." As information flows in, desire for freedom expands. The common people in China already do not enjoy "stability." By acknowledgement of the official Chinese press, instances of social instability (street protests and even riots) number in the many thousands each year, as peasants are displaced from their homes in land grabs by the local dictators, and as official corruption and party control of the police and the courts deny people recourse when their rights are violated. People I've met in China were embarrassed by the situation there already in 1982, the first time I was there, and they are losing hope that the current economic advancement is bringing with it political freedom. That is just what happened in Taiwan. People eventually gained the courage to demand their rights. I remember lots of people in both places who told me about their desire for freedom long, hard years before that freedom was won in Taiwan. Taiwan's example will point the way for people in China. They can have democracy and a free press if they stand up together. Chinese social scientists are deeply frightened by the huge wealth disparities between the differing regions of China, which are greater than those that existed in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. When you consider that barely more than half the population of China is even conversant in the standard national language, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... there is plainly a lot of possibility that China will repeat its historical pattern (experienced during my mother's childhood) of being split into regions not really united by a national government with effective control of all the territory now labeled as "China."